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Dear existing & future PLC software developers, I have published part 11 of my free PLC programming using TwinCAT 3 tutorial.

When you start to develop PLC software and you’ve worked for a few projects, you will come to a point where you will notice that certain parts of the software, like function blocks, will be copied between the projects. You’ll either do it by simple rewriting the same functions or function blocks again, or you will simply copy and paste it from one project to another. Also, once a project gets big enough, you will want to utilize something called libraries. With this we can achieve code re-use.

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Dear existing & future PLC software developers, I have published part 10 of my free PLC programming using TwinCAT 3 tutorial.

When designing and building a control system you will eventually want the control system to actuate something, be it a relay, a motor, a pneumatic system or maybe a complete 6-axis robot. To get feedback of the actuation, sensors are needed. In this part we will cover how we communicate with the environment using inputs and outputs.

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Dear existing & future PLC software developers, I have published part 9 of my free PLC programming using TwinCAT 3 tutorial.
In this part we’ll learn how to use one of the most used Beckhoff libraries for various purposes. We’ll learn how to measure execution time of PLC code, how to use a FIFO buffer and how to combine the power of using a TwinCAT real-time program with an application running in user-space (Windows).

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Dear existing & future PLC software developers, I have published part 8 of my free PLC programming using TwinCAT 3 tutorial.

As TwinCAT 3 conforms to the IEC61131-3 standard, there are certain things it has to be able to do. The Tc2_Standard library has many of the standard IEC functions such as timers and triggers, which we will look into in this part of the tutorial.

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Dear existing & future PLC software developers, I have published part 7 of my free PLC programming using TwinCAT 3 tutorial.

In this part we will go back to basics of IEC 61131-3 and structured text and look into instructions. This will cover IF/ELSE, CASE-switches and FOR/WHILE-loops. We will utilize our knowledge to write a CSV (comma separate value) event logger by using a state machine.

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Dear existing & future PLC software developers, I have published part 6b of my free PLC programming using TwinCAT 3 tutorial.

In this part we will continue our journey of the object oriented features of IEC 61131-3 and look into something called interfaces. Interfaces provide a layer of abstraction so that you can write code that is ignorant of unnecessary details. Interfaces aid you in designing more modular and robust software. With interfaces it’s possible to decouple direct dependencies between objects in your software.

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Dear existing & future PLC software developers, I have published part 6a of my free PLC programming using TwinCAT 3 tutorial.

In this part we will start to look into the object oriented programming parts of structured text and IEC 61131-3 called function blocks, and I think it’s here things are really starting to get fun! For those that are Java, C, C++ or just “traditional” programmers, going into the realm of function blocks is like going from C-style structures and functions, and into classes in C++. With function blocks we can go from working in a procedural style programming into objected oriented style programming.

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I have reached 1000 subscribers on YouTube! I never thought I’d get anywhere close to this huge amount of subscribers, especially not this fast! Since I published the first episodes of the “PLC programming using TwinCAT 3 tutorial” in the beginning of March on YouTube, the channel has received over 30.000 views. It seems free PLC programming tutorials are appreciated. It’s time to celebrate and answer some questions that I’ve got from you viewers!

 

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Dear existing & future PLC software developers, I have published the 5th part of my free PLC programming using TwinCAT 3 tutorial.

Arrays allow us to define types of variables that can hold several data items of the same kind. In this part of the tutorial we will look at a data unit type that allows us to hold several data items of different kind. We will also look at one of the basis of modularization and re-use in software development called functions. We will look at how we can get data in and out of functions, and we will also look at the difference between passing parameters by value and by reference. We will finish this part by writing our very first function!

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Dear existing & future PLC software developers, I have published the 4th part of my free PLC programming using TwinCAT 3 tutorial.

In this video we will look into the various data types that are available in the IEC 61131-3 standard, pointers & references and how to work with arrays. We will cover why pointers can be dangerous and why you generally want to prefer to use references instead. Then we will finish the tutorial by looking at how we can convert between different data types. Also, what is the relationship between the amount of stars in the universe and TwinCAT? Watch the video to learn!

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